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Richard Charles LARTER (b.1929; d.2014)

Richard Larter, often identified
as the founder of Australian ‘pop’ art, was born at Hornchurch in Essex England
in 1929. In 1962, he migrated to Australia where he would remain for the rest
of his life, leaving a lasting impression on Australian abstract art, with his
individualistic and often confrontational style.

In his early years in England,
Larter’s well-to-do parents had hoped their son would become a doctor, but the
young Richard had other ideas. He wanted to be an artist and enrolled in
classes at St Martin’s School of Art in London. These were short lived.

"The place was full of
squadron leaders with long moustaches drinking a great deal of beer, and it
just seemed hopeless to expect to find out anything about art,”* Larter said of
this brief sojourn with creativity.

Next, he
worked in the insurance sector but was sacked for being rude to his boss. During
his brief career as a surveyor, he met Patricia Holmes and the two lived with
Pat’s family on Canvey Island at the mouth of the Thames. It was during this
period that Larter seriously committed himself to painting. Unfortunately, most
of his work was destroyed in the “Great North Sea Flood” of January 31, 1953
and Canvey Island was evacuated.

A few weeks
later, Richard and Pat were married and moved to London where they studied at
night classes at the Toynbee Hall in the East End, working odd jobs during the
day. Inspired by a contemporary, Eduardo Paolozzi, “the father of British pop
art”, Larter began experimenting with his painting. He produced smooth lines of
varying thickness using a paint-filled hypodermic syringe. Later, he worked with rollers and stencils to
create his effects.

From
1954-57, Larter attended Shoreditch Teachers College in Surrey, then one of
England's pre-eminent arts institutes. Between 1957-62 he practiced as an
artist, exhibiting in Group shows in Paris, London and Moscow. In 1962, Larter
applied to the NSW Education Department to migrate as a teacher. He was to
spend the next 52 years enriching the Australian contemporary art scene.

In
Australia in the 60's and 70's, Larter became known for work that challenged
the prevailing conservative values of the time. For some, his work was seen as
too confronting and pornographic; for others, he was a breath of fresh air.

In 1972,
Larter abandoned art teaching to concentrate entirely on painting. Pat too was
painting as a “Mail artist”, an underground movement involving the exchange of
small-scale artworks by post. Critics complained that Larter’s output was
focussed too heavily on his wife; Larter came back with a composite portrait
made up of Pat in 42 different poses.

As Sydney
art critic Jeremy Eccles noted at the time of Larter’s death in 2014: “His
works were sexually explicit, politically and socially charged embodiments of
his strident anti-authoritarian stance, his pacifist views and liberated
attitudes. He was passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, had a strong
opposition to censorship and repression, and an absolute contempt for the
moralising, censorious hypocrisy of the Idiot Society he lived in.

"Its
ok to thump your wife, but disgusting to look at her vulva," Larter himself
would say. **

Larter's
sexually explicit “pop”inspired works were deliberately rendered to
expose the double standards of the time. Graphic sexual imagery was seen as a
greater taboo than depictions of violence.
Some of his more political works at the time came as a result of
Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War and the Whitlam Government’s
dismissal.

"By
depicting evil men (such as Malcolm Fraser, John Kerr, and Hitler) alongside
whores, pin-ups and raving beauties (who often seemed to be 'enjoying'
fellatio), I attempted to show what Hanna Arendt described as 'the banality of
evil '"***

Not all
of Larter’s work was based on the human figure however. He was also inspired by
the landscape around him, Islamic art (particularly for its decorative
patterns) and Aboriginal painting. A large part of his later oeuvre was
taken up by purely abstract paintings revelling in a cacophony of colours,
textures and shapes.

By the
time of his death in 2014, Richard Larter had participated in over one hundred
group exhibitions and had held more than sixty solo shows. He had won numerous
awards, the first being the Berrima Prize in 1965 which was judged by Daniel
Thomas. (It was because of this win that he had first came to the notice of
Frank Watters who mounted Larter’s first major exhibition in Sydney in 1965.)

In 1996,
Larter won the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National
Gallery of Victoria. He was given a
one-man show “Stripperama” at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2002. In 2008,
he was honoured with a Retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia.
Larter was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to painting
in 2011.

Sadly, Pat died
of lymphoma 1996 at the age of 60. Larter was devastated and moved from their
studio in Yass, New South Wales, to live in Canberra, in the Australian Capital
Territory. He continued his output of abstract art, though it dropped from its
peak of around 400 works a year to just over 100. He died in Canberra having just reached the
age of 85.

At the time of his death, the National Gallery of
Australia expressed its deep sadness at the passing of Richard Larter. Deborah
Thomas Senior Curator, Australian Paintings
and Sculpture post-1920 at NGA wrote that Larter was “one of this country's most
inventive artists who made a highly distinctive contribution to Australian art.
We worked closely with Larter on his 2008 retrospective exhibition and remember
his great warmth and energetic presence. He was a force to be reckoned with but
was also a most generous human being.”

Ron
Radford, director of the NGA remarked: ''Larter has painted exuberantly well
for over a half a century. As time has gone by, the emotive and technical range
of his inventiveness has become increasingly apparent, from striking energetic
works relating to the human figure through to radiant, subtle works relating to
nature. Across a spectrum of paintings he can be acknowledged as one of
Australia's most consistently fine artists and one of our great colourists.''

Larter’s work
is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia; National
Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South
Australia; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Ballarat Fine Art Gallery; and private
collections throughout Australia and overseas.